6 ms·

Nvidia researchers setup an open source sensor network on Antartica

78 points by wienke 4y ago

jmclnx 4y ago
Very nice they are doing that, but you know what would be a real altruism move ? Open up the source for Nvidia Chips so projects like OpenBSD and the other BSDs can run on hardware from Nvidia.
- freedomben 4y ago
  It seem self-defeating that they don't. If nvidia fully opened up their driver, they would de-facto own the GPU market (at least for ML, but probably gaming as well). Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up.
  - DigiDigiorno 4y ago
    They already own the data center gpu market, what are you taking about? Last I checked they already had monopoly evoking shares of that market. Like 80+ or 90+ percent
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    There's a better chance of hell freezing over, but it would certainly benefit users. From a economic standpoint though, it's entirely unsurprising why they do this. CUDA owns, and in the AI age it's hard to beat the parallelism Nvidia offers. If Nvidia cedes their acceleration advantage, they're leaving themselves open for attack. DirectX is a funny example of this, still being closed-source despite a reverse-engineered version existing with often better performance. It would be nice if everyone writing UNIX-like drivers gave away their source code, but then the books wouldn't balance. It's a tale that's half a century old now.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up. This is happening, albeit slowly, fwiw. Pytorch has ROCm support, but not great. AMD did win the exascale machine contracts and have custom hardware in the machines that are built. It does look like they've been using those contracts to invest more into computational sciences/ML. I can only hope that they continue at the pace they have in the consumer market. Competition between AMD and Nvidia (and hopefully Intel -- a pipe dream) can only be beneficial to us in the ML community.
- deusum 4y ago
  NVIDIA on FreeBSD is better than ever, but Wayland is broken, still, if my failed attempts are a fair measure.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... Coming up on a year since they've had source code available.
  - junon 4y ago
    For closed source blob adapters, which I suppose is something. It will allow kernel developers to integrate their drivers, without a really having the sources to the driver itself. You still get a closed source blob.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      Even AMD has closed source blobs as firmware though?
      - junon 4y ago
        Not sure they have open source adapters though. Maybe they do. But the big release from Nvidia last year was that you can see and use the code that calls into their blobs.
  - jmclnx 4y ago
    >NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 Seems only for a specific chip rev, does nothing for older revs. Also since it is a module, I presume just for Linux, does nothing for OpenBSD (especially) and probably do nothing for NetBSD. FYI, OpenBSD does not support kernel modules like Linux does.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      It's open source, which was the point being referenced by the post I replied to. The BSDs can use the code to guide their own implementations, as they have done for various other drivers. Also, it supports everything Turing onwards, which, while not ideal, does cover all the hardware they've made in the past 4.5 years.
deusum 4y ago
NVIDIA would rather bring open source to Antarctica than Linux.
- KeplerBoy 4y ago
  Apparently not all penguins are equal.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  http://www.emperorlinux.com/search/?q=nvidia http://www.emperorlinux.com/search/?q=nvidia EmperorLinux Inc lists Dells, Thinkpads with Nvidia graphics cards.
  - godelski 4y ago
    And Pop's main appeal is that Nvidia graphics cards (nearly) "just work". But that's not what the parent is getting at.
whitemary 4y ago
> SAEF (Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Feature) What exactly is an “Environmental Feature?” I would think Antarctica has multiple.
- justinpowers 4y ago
  “Feature” can mean “physical beauty” as well as simply “appearance” or “form”, though all such are considered obsolete usages.
- nico 4y ago
  It’s a typo, it should be “future” instead of “feature”. Good catch. SAEFs website: https://arcsaef.com/ https://arcsaef.com/
- junon 4y ago
  "Securing Antarctica's Future [and] Environment" aka SAFE ("and" being optional) would have been a bunch clearer, imo.
detrites 4y ago
*Antarctica
brink 4y ago
Is this Nvidia's repentance for the crypto mining and price gouging?
thewopr 4y ago
Having been in technology, antarctic research, and remote monitoring of environmental systems down there, my take: don't read into this this too much. This is mostly a PR piece, probably pushed by the university or non-profit researchers involved. They are trying to use some sort of partnership with NVIDIA (as loose as that partnership might be) to draw attention and show they are having "Broader Impacts" for their impact statement. Most eco research is based on historical comparisons of months/years/decades of data So the use of real-time/streaming data down there is pretty limited. You can just as easily shove the data into storage and have a researcher pick it up next time they go down (often *much* easier as you don't have to worry about powering comms systems). Climate/weather data may be different, if only because some of the data might go into current/real-time weather models. But even there, it's probably a stretch (I know of very little work being done with anything near real-time as far as data goes down there).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- earthscienceman 4y ago
  Hey @thewopr. I'm actually working on real-time measurement transmission of the climate parameters, though at the other pole in the Arctic. I always imagined people working on such things were here on HN. This article is absolutely a PR/puff piece. This type of transmission isn't novel, unique, or "AIoT"... using that acronym for this is beyond hilarious, I'd challenge anyone on the project to describe how AI is in any way relevant to the project beyond NVIDIA PR blurbs. I've looked through the research and the only thing I've found is a nebulous "we will analyze the data with AI at some point". But! People have been doing these sorts of measurements and transmitting them from these sorts of places for... ever... basically. Also entirely based on open source. The autonomous station I(we)'ve designed uses a custom Linux box/SoC for low power data processing and amalgamation and the results are transmitted in realtime back here to the USA to be ingested by models, without a single chip designed by NVIDIA. From places much more remote than a few kms from a base in Antarctica, we had a station running in the Arctic ice pack during winter. Not to add more criticism, but I also always love how these puff pieces don't actually link to the research of the people who put in the work on the project[1]. As an aside, AI could actually very relevant/important for these types of measurements. One idea I'm working to spin up: Vertical profile retrievals of important atmospheric measurements (cloud properties, and more) are extremely power intensive and nearly impossible to do autonomously via lidar/radar. However, there are many ways one could imagine designing a low power implementation of those retrievals using a combination of different sensors and a cleverly trained algorithm to get at the parameters of interest. Anyway, link/tell me about some of your remote monitoring. I'm pretty disconnected from the south side of these things. [1] https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2023/world-first-mosscam-and-smart-sensor-system-developed-by-uow-researchers.php https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2023/world-first-mosscam-and-sm...

78 points by wienke 4y ago

Very nice they are doing that, but you know what would be a real altruism move ? Open up the source for Nvidia Chips so projects like OpenBSD and the other BSDs can run on hardware from Nvidia.

freedomben 4y ago
It seem self-defeating that they don't. If nvidia fully opened up their driver, they would de-facto own the GPU market (at least for ML, but probably gaming as well). Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up.
- DigiDigiorno 4y ago
  They already own the data center gpu market, what are you taking about? Last I checked they already had monopoly evoking shares of that market. Like 80+ or 90+ percent
- smoldesu 4y ago
  There's a better chance of hell freezing over, but it would certainly benefit users. From a economic standpoint though, it's entirely unsurprising why they do this. CUDA owns, and in the AI age it's hard to beat the parallelism Nvidia offers. If Nvidia cedes their acceleration advantage, they're leaving themselves open for attack. DirectX is a funny example of this, still being closed-source despite a reverse-engineered version existing with often better performance. It would be nice if everyone writing UNIX-like drivers gave away their source code, but then the books wouldn't balance. It's a tale that's half a century old now.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Conversely if AMD could get support into most of the ML libs, they could start cleaning up. This is happening, albeit slowly, fwiw. Pytorch has ROCm support, but not great. AMD did win the exascale machine contracts and have custom hardware in the machines that are built. It does look like they've been using those contracts to invest more into computational sciences/ML. I can only hope that they continue at the pace they have in the consumer market. Competition between AMD and Nvidia (and hopefully Intel -- a pipe dream) can only be beneficial to us in the ML community.
deusum 4y ago
NVIDIA on FreeBSD is better than ever, but Wayland is broken, still, if my failed attempts are a fair measure.
dotnet00 4y ago
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... Coming up on a year since they've had source code available.
- junon 4y ago
  For closed source blob adapters, which I suppose is something. It will allow kernel developers to integrate their drivers, without a really having the sources to the driver itself. You still get a closed source blob.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Even AMD has closed source blobs as firmware though?
    - junon 4y ago
      Not sure they have open source adapters though. Maybe they do. But the big release from Nvidia last year was that you can see and use the code that calls into their blobs.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  >NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 Seems only for a specific chip rev, does nothing for older revs. Also since it is a module, I presume just for Linux, does nothing for OpenBSD (especially) and probably do nothing for NetBSD. FYI, OpenBSD does not support kernel modules like Linux does.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    It's open source, which was the point being referenced by the post I replied to. The BSDs can use the code to guide their own implementations, as they have done for various other drivers. Also, it supports everything Turing onwards, which, while not ideal, does cover all the hardware they've made in the past 4.5 years.

deusum 4y ago

NVIDIA would rather bring open source to Antarctica than Linux.

KeplerBoy 4y ago
Apparently not all penguins are equal.
abudabi123 4y ago
http://www.emperorlinux.com/search/?q=nvidia http://www.emperorlinux.com/search/?q=nvidia EmperorLinux Inc lists Dells, Thinkpads with Nvidia graphics cards.
- godelski 4y ago
  And Pop's main appeal is that Nvidia graphics cards (nearly) "just work". But that's not what the parent is getting at.

whitemary 4y ago

> SAEF (Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Feature) What exactly is an “Environmental Feature?” I would think Antarctica has multiple.

justinpowers 4y ago
“Feature” can mean “physical beauty” as well as simply “appearance” or “form”, though all such are considered obsolete usages.
nico 4y ago
It’s a typo, it should be “future” instead of “feature”. Good catch. SAEFs website: https://arcsaef.com/ https://arcsaef.com/
junon 4y ago
"Securing Antarctica's Future [and] Environment" aka SAFE ("and" being optional) would have been a bunch clearer, imo.

detrites 4y ago

*Antarctica

brink 4y ago

Is this Nvidia's repentance for the crypto mining and price gouging?

thewopr 4y ago

Having been in technology, antarctic research, and remote monitoring of environmental systems down there, my take: don't read into this this too much. This is mostly a PR piece, probably pushed by the university or non-profit researchers involved. They are trying to use some sort of partnership with NVIDIA (as loose as that partnership might be) to draw attention and show they are having "Broader Impacts" for their impact statement. Most eco research is based on historical comparisons of months/years/decades of data So the use of real-time/streaming data down there is pretty limited. You can just as easily shove the data into storage and have a researcher pick it up next time they go down (often *much* easier as you don't have to worry about powering comms systems). Climate/weather data may be different, if only because some of the data might go into current/real-time weather models. But even there, it's probably a stretch (I know of very little work being done with anything near real-time as far as data goes down there).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
earthscienceman 4y ago
Hey @thewopr. I'm actually working on real-time measurement transmission of the climate parameters, though at the other pole in the Arctic. I always imagined people working on such things were here on HN. This article is absolutely a PR/puff piece. This type of transmission isn't novel, unique, or "AIoT"... using that acronym for this is beyond hilarious, I'd challenge anyone on the project to describe how AI is in any way relevant to the project beyond NVIDIA PR blurbs. I've looked through the research and the only thing I've found is a nebulous "we will analyze the data with AI at some point". But! People have been doing these sorts of measurements and transmitting them from these sorts of places for... ever... basically. Also entirely based on open source. The autonomous station I(we)'ve designed uses a custom Linux box/SoC for low power data processing and amalgamation and the results are transmitted in realtime back here to the USA to be ingested by models, without a single chip designed by NVIDIA. From places much more remote than a few kms from a base in Antarctica, we had a station running in the Arctic ice pack during winter. Not to add more criticism, but I also always love how these puff pieces don't actually link to the research of the people who put in the work on the project[1]. As an aside, AI could actually very relevant/important for these types of measurements. One idea I'm working to spin up: Vertical profile retrievals of important atmospheric measurements (cloud properties, and more) are extremely power intensive and nearly impossible to do autonomously via lidar/radar. However, there are many ways one could imagine designing a low power implementation of those retrievals using a combination of different sensors and a cleverly trained algorithm to get at the parameters of interest. Anyway, link/tell me about some of your remote monitoring. I'm pretty disconnected from the south side of these things. [1] https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2023/world-first-mosscam-and-smart-sensor-system-developed-by-uow-researchers.php https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2023/world-first-mosscam-and-sm...